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Alone.

I didn’t want to… feel… things, but we had too much physical history, and it was starting to bubble up again. I needed to squash that, and fast. My life literally depended on it.

Chapter

Sixteen

Ifelt like a spy. I had never handled surveillance equipment before, but with Lucien’s help, I was starting to get the hang of it. Our long, telescopic camera fed images directly into a laptop that sat on the desk. We had parabolic microphones that could pick up small sounds from several hundreds of yards away and drones we could deploy from the roof to scout the temple building via remote.

Many times, I caught myself marveling at what we were doing, telling myself it was like being in a movie… I realized I had already said that several times today, at least to myself, but every ounce of life I had ever lived had been through a television set, or from out of the pages of a book.

I couldn’t believe I was here, in this hotel, running surveillance on an ominous looking building across the street under orders from a mob boss—as I was fairly sure at this point that the Diaboli family were some kind of magical Mafia family. I had lived a sheltered life, sequestered from the world, and I honestly didn’t know how to handle this.

Lucien probably thought I was the most annoying person in the world, with all my questions.

“Remind me what this does?” I asked, as I handled what looked like an oversized laser pointer.

“Don’t press that button,” he said. “The laser will burn your retina clean off.”

“What? Why would we want this?”

“This device measures distances to the millimeter. All you have to do is point it at something, and you’ll get a reading right here.”

I aimed it at the door to the room and pressed the button. A green dot suddenly appeared on the door, and on the screen the readout flashed to life. Twenty-eight yards. “It’s not very subtle, is it?” I asked.

“What isn’t?”

“That green dot. Won’t someone see it?”

“Not if you’re far enough away. The light dissipates, but the reading is still accurate.”

I nodded, set the pen down, and moved over to the bed while Lucien turned his attention to the telescopic camera he had set up on a tripod. Using a small attachment connected to it, Lucien took picture after picture, each of them appearing an instant later on the laptop’s screen.

“What are we looking for?” I asked, searching the images as they came through.

“Movement. I want to know how many people are in that building at a time. Who goes in. Who goes out. What kind of security they have. If they change shifts. When they change shifts.”

“And you really think we’ll figure that out from up here?”

“No, but that’s what the drones are for.”

“And if the drones don’t work?”

Lucien looked over at me. “Then we do it the old-fashioned way.”

I swallowed. “What’s that?”

“We’ll have to walk over and take a look.”

“Oh… right,” I shook my head. “Of course. These Recondites aren’t just going to let us stroll into their temple, though, what if they have magical defenses?”

“They definitely have magical defenses. Figuring those out is going to be part of our in person scouting. For now, I just want to know what kind of foot traffic that building gets. There doesn’t seem to be anyone going in or out, not a single person all morning. I also can’t see into the building’s windows.”

“You can’t?”

Lucien walked over to the laptop and pulled up an image. “This, right here. The windows aren’t tinted—see? I was able to take a shot of the desk on the other side of the window, the laptop, the coffee cup, the pile of papers in the pigeonhole.”

“I’m amazed at the lack of ceremonial pulpits and weird effigies.”